Issue 12

Summer 2014

Surviving Childhood

Some of us were happier recalling how lady slippers poked up from forest floors in early spring, like testicular sacks on stems, even the youngest among us aware picking them was against the law, just like the other acts we refrained from committing, conscious that even when we were alone, someone was watching. That’s the current joke: lonely surrounded by thousands, though we know each of the many has his own endangered flower in a wood somewhere, wanting to be noticed, formemory is in the way you laugh now compared to how you did so then with all you have discovered in between, reluctantly resisting or eagerly obeying. Either way, any of us could have been pulled from the bicycle that lay pitched to the side of the road, its back wheel spinning.